


our overture

by nyavericked



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, M/M, Reunions, fucking off to nowhere as monarchs do, izumi is tired, leo as an actual monarch, some lionheart callbacks like all leoizu fic i'm not original
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 21:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10908210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyavericked/pseuds/nyavericked
Summary: Royalty AU. One night, Leo left everything and everyone behind - including Izumi, who had only an empty throne and an aching soul to remember him by. When he returns years later, the kingdom rejoices... but what is Izumi, a make believe king, supposed to do when his true lord returns?in which Leo's place is among the gods and Izumi's place is next to him.





	our overture

**Author's Note:**

> as per usual, i have a recommended song for listening while reading this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLMeDUBKmBs
> 
> please enjoy!

 

If you asked Izumi, there was no point in big, dramatic gestures.

( _Hypocrite_ would be Arashi’s immediate rebuttal, coughing being a fair hand.)

Still, his point remained. If you were pulling out fireworks for every single celebration like Morisawa insisted or gave every girl a bouquet like Hakaze, didn’t those things start to lose meaning? Given how often they were exercised in their band of misfits, in their kingdom of eccentrics, there was no point in grand declarations. Every single gesture had already been done.

And besides – as long as it’s understood between you and the person that you were expressing your feelings to – why would you ever need to do more than was absolutely necessary?

( _Romantic_ would be Tsukasa’s hum, soft-eyed and amused at his elder’s sweetness.)

Still.

The organ sang with Leo’s return.

Its voice – voices, with the multitude of chords that echoed from the pipes – rang through the air of their kingdom. Ritsu stirred from his nap in the strategy room. Mao opened the windows in his confusion, wondering why the song erupted from the cathedral in the middle of the day. Rumor has it that even their local freaky fish man peeked his head up from the garden fountain to hear the song.

“Itsuki’s going to be irritated…” Eichi commented in the hallway next to Anzu, the new scribe girl.

Izumi rushed past him as he adjusted his cloak, the length of it falling behind him like a trusty shadow. Still, he could spare a moment to throw a disdainful look at Tenshouin, “Don’t sound so excited, you trash heap.”

(Even if it’s not like he was wrong. The cathedral organ was Shu’s pride and joy, some of his family’s personal treasury going into their funding. He worked personally to ensure that their kingdom had the best set of pipes known to man. Everyone knew that. 

Leo knew that.)

 

* * *

 

Arriving on the church steps, Izumi was reminded of why he never ran anywhere. His chest heaved in his rib cage with his heart as its furious captive. In front of the majesty of the structure, “a place of worship of all dominations” as it had been called when it was first erected in the city, he felt small. It wasn’t a feeling that he liked.

But here, no mater how he puffed out his chest and turned his nose up, there would be no air of superiority for a man like him.

Opening the gilded double doors, he was embraced in the full sound of the organ as it filled the empty church. It filled him from the tips of his toes to the top of his head, permeating to his very core.

Some part of him recognized the song that was playing now – the mess of keys, the soaring crescendo, the absolute mastery it would take to even attempt the piece – it was Leo’s composition for his coronation day.

(Shu had wrinkled his nose at the piece in bafflement when he first saw it, before insisting that no one aside from Leo and himself could be able to perfectly perform it for the ceremony. It was that type of song.

Izumi wondered if it was Leo playing one of his genius games with Shu, but that was neither here nor there.)

No one had played this song since Leo’s disappearance – since he’d packed his bag one eve and left a letter with a promise to return, if only for Ruka. Shu had personally set fire to all copies of the score but the original in his irritation and refused to recreate it until ‘Tsukinaga takes responsibility for his damn bloodline.’

The revival of this song would be enough to slide the last pieces in place for everyone else who hadn’t figured it out: their king had returned.

Yet as Izumi walked down the aisle, cape flowing behind him and royal insignia pinned on his lapel as it had been for the past few years since Leo had left, he let his eyes fall upon the man at the organ seat. Light permeated through the hues of the stained glass windows, bathing him in glorious color even as his fingers lingered on the last notes of his own anthem. As he turned in his seat upon hearing Izumi’s boots fall against marble floors, the golden shine of the organ pipes reflected him in a glow.

If he took but one glance, Izumi might have mistaken him for a lesser, playful god.

As it was, Leo’s eyes crinkled at the edges, cheeks lifted with the force of his smile as he greeted him as if they had seen each other just yesterday: “Sena!”

Izumi felt the first encasement of ice around his heart crack. His footsteps stopped. His fingertips curled in to press against his palm. He prayed that his eyes did not betray the hope that he felt.

“… what do you think you’re doing?” Izumi let the line of his lips fall into a familiar scowl.

“Giving you a heart attack!” Leo answered proudly, adjusting the cloak around his own shoulders – some ratty thing in comparison to the fine velvet that draped behind Izumi – and then laughing. “So what I do best, I guess! Wahahaha!”

His laugh echoed in the empty church.

Izumi bit his tongue, did not mention how so often he would entertain the idea of getting down on his knees in these pews just to hear that sound again, to fill up the emptiness of a castle without his lord, his king, his—

“Leo,” he spat out a name, eyes narrowing. “If you know that then—”

“Did you know that the world is round? That if you head West – and kept going West, and West, and Wester than that, eventually you would be East of where you originally started?” Leo interrupted, babbled excitedly as he sat on the very edge of the organ bench. His muddied boots sullied the marble. Shu was going to fucking lose it. “So if I went West aaaaalllllll the way around, then I’d still get to end up here!”

“Are you telling me that you went in a straight line around the world—”

“No, but I want to.”

Izumi froze. Leo had just returned – barely even that, he’d merely stepped foot back in his own kingdom – and he was thinking of leaving again? Already?

Thoughts raced through his mind. How quickly could he pack a bag of his own? Would Arashi or Ritsu be more appropriate for the throne in his stead? How many more times would this kingdom have its throne be abdicated before Eichi weaseled his way to the crown jewels?

“… but I found myself back here anyway! Without going all the way West,” Leo explained. His smile curled into something more arrogant, more amused at the way that Izumi seemed to come crashing back to the conversation with all the elegance of a newborn foal.

He’d gone too long without meeting his lord toe to toe. The conversation was giving him whiplash.

“You’re going off on tangents for no reason…!” Izumi complained, “If you’ve got a point to make, then make it!”

Even if some part of him wasn’t sure if he wanted that. If Leo was going off on tangents in front of him, if Izumi had reasons to be getting mad at him, that meant that Leo was still with him.

That was already a vast improvement from the past few years.

“The point is—!! …. The point is…. The point is?” Leo’s expressions switched from one to another, confidence filtering out like a boat that suddenly sprung a leak. “Ah… Sena! I lost it! What was the point again?”

If it weren’t for the fact that everything that he was wearing cost the royal treasury a small fortune, Izumi would’ve thrown something at him.

Lesser god? Who was he kidding. He was talking to Icarus, the fool who crashed and burned for trying to become too close to them.

“The only point that you’ll be seeing is the sharp end of my sword if you don’t get your ass back to the castle—” Izumi began, scathing and irritated as he crossed his arms in front of him. His gloved fingertips pressed into the fabric bunched at his elbows after a moment, as if he was still trying to hold himself together.

He could not stand to be in awe of his king – he never possessed the ability for glossy-eyed admiration like others. Even when Leo had surmounted daunting tasks – using his quick-turning mind to answer problems of famine from the outskirts of the kingdom, negotiating trade deals with his burning charisma like a star walking the earth, even leaving behind a series of scribbled notes of problems he saw looming in the distance before he even left – Izumi had never praised him. He had never been shocked by Leo was capable of. It never occurred to him that he would ever need to do more than stay by Leo’s side.

Until Leo decided that he needed to go somewhere that Izumi couldn’t follow.

“…. or,” he began before he could think better of the word.

Leo blinked in confusion, eyes imploring as he parroted: “Or?”

Izumi felt the steel tremble in his spine. His pride tried to choke what he wanted to say next, to take the life from the words before they escaped and were made manifest outside of his thoughts.

“… or if the castle is not your destination, then spare me enough time to grab what I need to go with you to wherever you are going.”

‘If you’re going to take off, at least don’t take off without me.’

Finally, it looked like Leo was the one out of his depth.

His eyebrows raised into his hairline, his incessant foot-tapping silenced suddenly, and Izumi watched the almost imperceptibly small movement of his shoulders evening.

“Sena… I couldn’t ask—”

‘I couldn’t ask that of you’ nearly left his lips. Izumi knew it. So he snarled before the sentiment could be completed.

“You couldn’t _what?_ ”

He felt the resentment bubbling and he almost tried to stop it. In truth, he would rarely let himself dream of the day that Leo would come back. What would he say? What would he do? In the sweeter, impossible scenarios, he wouldn’t have even raised his voice.

In the crashing reality, he knew that every rose had its thorns and Izumi always believed the loveliest of them would cut the worst and when you least expected.

“You couldn’t ask me to come with you on whatever stupid journey you have planned next—but you’re the one who _could_ leave in the first place? You couldn’t stay in your kingdom, but you _could_ leave behind remnants of yourself everywhere like a ghost? You couldn’t even write a letter for us to know that you were alive, but you _could_ dream up dumb ideas like crossing the world all over again?

“You know you can’t just do that, right? You can’t be that selfish! You can’t just be this guiding light for everyone and then… disappear!”

Leo did so much.

Leo saw the good in everyone – even in people like Izumi. Where Izumi was thorns, Leo saw roses. Where Izumi was rainclouds, Leo saw rainbows. Where Izumi was the end, Leo saw new beginnings.

Leo left chaos and disaster in his wake.

Trembling in his anger, Izumi was faintly aware of his own hands shaking.

This person – told him that he was beautiful, that he was smart, that he was clever and capable of more than he could ever dream of.

But when Leo left and Izumi was given the crown in his place, he felt like none of those things. His soul felt twisted as he couldn’t connect with commoners the way that Leo did, with a skip in his step and a song in his heart. Time after time, he defaulted back to Ritsu’s suggestions and Arashi’s empathy for consultation – he’d never felt more like a tool.

Seated above him on the raised dais, Leo’s expression turned dark. His brows knit together, his nose scrunched unpleasantly, and his mouth curled into a frown.

There was his remorse, plain as day. For a genius, he could be so foolish.

Izumi kept his gaze locked on his king, searching for something. Anything more. Was there a larger purpose to this, or had this point been lost too?

“Is this all you meant for me?”

Leo rose. In the mad scramble to his feet, he nearly tripped. “I didn’t—”

“Because I can’t do it anymore.”

It had been a lingering thought. Something that curled in the back of his mind when he watched Tsukasa negotiate with merchants and Ritsu go over terrain maps to determine points of expansion. Izumi was unlikable and he was untalented.

He’d never been suited to be royal.

“You’re selfish enough to dream of gallivanting off into the sunset, shirking your duties,” Izumi pointed out. He hesitated, before adding. “I’m not selfless enough to let you go.”

If he was a romantic who believed in big, grand gestures, Izumi would be capable of so much more than this. In his heart, he knew that someone as full of light and love as Leo deserved the world. Someone braver would promise that to him.

Izumi wasn’t that kind of person.

Instead, he fell to one knee and bowed his head. Crossing one am over his chest, he unpinned the sign of royalty from his lapel and instead placed it on the ground between him and Leo.

“I won’t fight your battles for you anymore. I’m not meant to be you.”

Remaining as still as a statue even as Leo took the heavy steps down the stairs, Izumi didn’t flinch even as his lord crouched down in front of him and collected the pin from where it rested between them. With nimble, skilled fingers, he turned it over in the light.

Softly, Leo mused, “I’m not sure if I’m meant to be me, either.”

Allowing his eyes to flick up to his lord, Izumi’s piercing gaze was met with a softer, more melancholic one.

“But I think it’d be the greatest crime to humanity if I took away the chance for you to be Izumi Sena. The world would hate me for it.” With a deft movement, as if it hadn’t been years since he’d worn it, he placed the to fasten his cloak. “So if it means that you can be free, I can be king.”

Is this what freedom tasted like?

Izumi continued to work against himself, to turn the conversation in circles as he argued, “But you—”

“Want to travel the world… but maybe that’ll be for vacation. Or for exploration. Whichever one is more likely to get approved by the council…” Leo answered, snickering softly. “But I learned something out there. Besides the thing about West becoming East.

“I’ve learned that there are sights more beautiful than anything we can find in this kingdom—mountains so tall that if you climb to the top, I think you’d find the home of the gods. Skies so full of stars that you wonder how they don’t all just run into each other. Seas so vast, so full of wonder, so _alive_ that everything else feels like it’s moving too slowly, like time works differently when you’re away from it. And I learned that every time I saw something new, something exciting, something that made my heart beat so fast that I was gonna _die_ , I thought—

“I wish Izumi was here.”

“Leo—”

The word was stolen from his tongue just as his breath was stolen from his lungs when Leo crashed their lips together.

The returned king let his fingers curl into Izumi’s hair at the back of his neck, holding him in place. Leo’s mouth searched Izumi’s, as if still mapping out every unknown that laid before him.

In his moment of weakness, Izumi let him. His eyes slid shut and he thought to himself about how Leo tasted like the smell pine and earth.

When they parted, if it could truly be called that when Leo kept their foreheads pressed together so their eyes could lock, Leo was smiling. Apparently he was pleased with his surprise.

He whispered in the space of their intermingling breaths, “Have I ever told you that I think you came from the sea?”

(So vast, so full of wonder, so _alive_.)

Izumi did think that time was moving differently now.

Even if he knew that he still had different sets of feelings to sort through, Izumi felt one emotion above all: greed. He wanted more answers, he wanted more certainty than this unstable ground, he wanted more and more and more of Leo’s attention.

“Take me there,” he demanded.

Even if it wasn’t soon. Even if it took forever. Even if the seasons passed and the years changed and you couldn’t even recognize the same path to the sea anymore—

He wanted to believe that Leo would take him there.

(Just like he’d always wanted to believe that Leo would come back.)

Close as they were, there was no hiding away from the warmth in Leo’s eyes. It was a familiar warmth, one that wrapped around Izumi like a blanket, and he felt himself relaxing immediately.

“Mm,” his king hummed a note of affirmation softly. “I promise.”

 

* * *

 

Izumi wasn’t sure why Leo was surprised at the immediate chaos that followed his arrival. 

Once back at the castle, they were rushed. Everyone – and did he mean everyone, even Morisawa’s motley crew for some reason – came stampeding toward Leo, all shouting different things, and Izumi let his vindictive side win out as he entirely sidestepped that entire fiasco.

Big, dramatic gestures were still too annoying, after all.

Still, he found himself in the royal study working next to Leo anyway – because for some reason, he still had to be the one who put the royal seal on all documentation that put everything back in Leo’s name. Hasumi was such a stickler for formality. Stupid.

Until Leo threw himself back against his – what were they now? Other questions that still needed to be answered – predecessor would have to work for now, and he immediately starting complaining.

“Why do I have to do this? Can’t we get Rittsu to do it? How about Anzu?”

“Don’t ask the scribe girl to forge your signature, are you stupid?” Izumi asked, baffled even as he accepted the familiar weight against him.

“I trust her with my life already!” Leo answered. So yes, he was stupid.

Still, something about that irritated Izumi. He made a noise of agitation before catching Leo’s flailing hand before it smacked him in the face. “Hey.”

The gesture managed to get Leo to pause for once – green eyes flicked over to Izumi in confusion and mirrored irritation.

“Don’t give your life away so quickly,” Izumi grumbled immediately, even as he turned Leo’s hand over in his own. “That’s mine now too, you know?”

Letting his eyes glance over the hand in his – Leo’s journey left his fingers calloused for whatever reason, they felt rougher even though they were smaller than Izumi’s, shorter – Izumi sighed.

Softly, as if swearing a vow, he let his lips brush over the knuckles of Leo’s hand.

Dramatic overtures and over the top gestures were stupid.

As long as the feeling conveyed is understood between the two people sharing it, wasn’t that what was important?

As Izumi observed the way that Leo’s face went red from embarrassment with intense smugness, he let his lips curl into a smile.

He thinks Leo got the point.

**Author's Note:**

> for the record, I started this before the gacha came out but then the translations were so good that I felt inspired to finish the rest of it.....
> 
> thank you for reading!! my twitter is @sunwritten if you want more headcanons and writing scraps!


End file.
